Nepali Film ‘Shirjara’ Among 24 Projects Selected for Tokyo Film Market
Nepali filmmaker Bikash Subedi’s upcoming feature ‘Shirjara: The Song of Grandmother’ has been selected for the Tokyo Gap-Financing Market, marking a significant international step for the project. The film is among 24 projects chosen from hundreds of submissions worldwide and is the only selection from South Asia this year.
Organized under the Tokyo International Film Festival, the market brings together promising film projects seeking international financing, co-production partnerships and distribution opportunities.
With its selection, ‘Shirjara’ joins projects associated with filmmakers and production companies that have established their presence at major international festivals including Cannes, Venice and Berlin.
This year’s lineup includes projects by Singaporean filmmaker Junfeng Boo, a Cannes award winner, and acclaimed Kazakh director Adilkhan Yerzhanov, whose work has been showcased at Cannes and Venice.
Also featured are projects linked to Indonesia’s KawanKawan Media, the production company behind the Cannes-winning ‘Tiger Stripes’, Vietnamese filmmaker Diep Nguyen Hoang, whose work has received recognition at Venice, and Brazilian director Matias Mariani, whose films have screened at the Berlin International Film Festival.
For Subedi, sharing the lineup with internationally recognized filmmakers places both the director and the Nepali project on an important global industry platform.
Produced by Kingdom Network, ‘Shirjara: The Song of Grandmother’ is being developed as a high-concept story that brings artificial intelligence, human emotion, ancestral memory and Himalayan spirituality into the same cinematic world.
At the centre of the story is an artificial intelligence expert working to develop digital sensory technology capable of understanding human emotions. Her journey takes an unexpected turn when she travels to her ancestral homeland in Nepal with her grandmother.
As they reach an altitude of around 5,000 metres, the technological mission begins to transform into something far more personal and philosophical.
Surrounded by the vast Himalayan landscape, she is forced to confront the limitations of modern technology and the arrogance that can accompany it. The emotional data she has been searching for, she gradually discovers, may not exist somewhere outside herself but within the inherited memory, blood and consciousness of her ancestors.
Through this journey, ‘Shirjara’ explores the relationship between technology and nature, modern intelligence and inherited wisdom, and the human desire to understand emotions that cannot simply be reduced to data.
The Tokyo market has previously played an important role in the international journey of a Nepali film. In 2020, Min Bahadur Bham’s ‘Shambhala’ was selected for the same market and went on to win the award for best project.
Four years later, ‘Shambhala’ made history by competing in the main competition of the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival.
Following its Tokyo selection, the ‘Shirjara’ team will now have the opportunity to meet international distributors and European co-producers, opening conversations around financing, co-production and the film’s eventual global release.
Blending contemporary technology with the spiritual and cultural consciousness of the Himalayas, ‘Shirjara: The Song of Grandmother’ now enters an important stage of its international journey, adding another Nepali project to the growing presence of the country’s cinema on the global stage.
